Archive for the 'family and friends' Category

So my gmail address is a very simple one. First initial, last name. I love having it, because it’s easy to tell people. No numbers, random letters, underscores. One downside to it is that for some reason a lot of other people think it’s their email address too. I’m not just talking spam — I get random personal emails and lots of e-commerce confirmations to my address.

What I do with these things depends a bit on my mood. If someone has used my email to sign up for something, sometimes I will go in and delete their account, or change their password to something random. Especially if it’s a myspace account. Personal emails I generally delete, after making sure it wasn’t really meant for me. Some of them make me feel bad, because they’re things like ‘here’s your son’s progress report’ or ‘do you want to go to the movies?’ and stuff people might actually miss.

So the other night I got a personal email for a girl (not me). It was from a job recruiter guy and said, basically, “Your dad told me you’re looking for a job, send me your resume and I can give it to the executive director at [Location]”. I read it, at first curious to see if it was actually a cleverly disguised piece of spam. But [Location] appeared to be a real place and the qualifications he listed seemed like real ones someone might have gotten from a person’s dad.

At that point I started to feel a little bad. Here’s this girl looking for a job, no easy task in today’s economy, and her dad cares enough to do a little networking for her — but somehow doesn’t actually know her email address.

Then I looked more closely at the email. I checked something on Facebook.